We’re officially halfway through the second season of Fallout. With only four episodes left, let’s take a look at where the main characters stand. Here are some of the important plotlines taking place across the Wasteland.
Lucy and The Ghoul
Lucy, The Ghoul and their canine companion Dogmeat spend the first half of Season 2 heading to New Vegas. They’re looking for Lucy’s father Hank MacLean, but for different reasons. Lucy wants to bring Hank back to Vault 33 to face justice for nuking Shady Sands. The Ghoul hopes that Hank, a Vault-Tec employee, knows what happened to his ex-wife Barb (Hank used to be her personal assistant) and their daughter Janey.
Their journey isn’t an easy one. The Ghoul’s cynical, hardened outlook clashes with Lucy’s naive optimism and her desire to help everyone she meets. A wedge is driven between them when they encounter two injured members of Caesar’s Legion, a detail the Ghoul refuses to share with Lucy.
A brutal fight with Radscorpions leaves both the Ghoul and a female Legion slave poisoned. Lucy, fed up with Ghoul’s attitude, saves the woman by giving her the only Stimpak she has. She leaves the Ghoul behind but promises to return for him.
When Lucy is captured and crucified by the Legion, a recovering Ghoul turns to what’s left of the New California Republic (NCR) for resources.
He rescues her by seemingly trading the location of the NCR Rangers in exchange for her freedom. Once they escape, the Ghoul sets off dynamite in the middle of the camp, prompting the in-fighting Legion to turn on each other. The whole sequence is framed as a sign that the Ghoul is slowly regaining a piece of the humanity he used to have when he was Cooper Howard.
The two get along better in episode 4, “The Demon in the Snow.” That’s mainly because Lucy is high on the Buffout she was given over a two-day period as she recovered from her crucifixion.
The steroid makes her an impulsive, aggressive spitfire who shoots first, asks questions later. She’s one step closer to becoming the kind of survivor the Ghoul believes she needs to be. Though even in her haze, she’s unsettled by what she’s turning into.
The episode ends with their arrival in New Vegas, only to find it rundown and abandoned. What was once Mr. House’s Lucky 38 Casino, is now a Deathclaw nest, where the duo is confronted by a Deathclaw Matriarch.
Maximus and the Brotherhood
In Season 1, Maximus was eager to prove himself to the Brotherhood of Steel. In Season 2, he achieves the rank of Knight but he’s growing disillusioned with the faction.
At first, Maximus hopes to reform the Brotherhood from within. He believes he can save it from its power-hungry, supremacist-leaning ways, but the corruption runs too deep. While Elder Cleric Quintus tries to unite all the West Coast factions against the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth responds by sending Paladin Xander Harkness as an emissary to prevent a rebellion.
Maximus starts to bond with Xander as the Paladin tries to sway the young soldier to side with the Commonwealth. Things take a dark turn when they find a factory filled with Ghoul children working for a ghoulified Thaddeus.
Xander wants to kill the children since the Brotherhood deems ghouls as abominations, much to Maximus’ horror. After failing to reason with Xander, Maximus kills him by smashing his own super sledge over his head.
Knowing he’s just triggered a civil war between the West Coast Brotherhood and the Commonwealth, Maximus convinces Thaddeus to impersonate Xander using the dead Paladin’s power armor. Thaddeus is terrible at impersonating Xander, which makes sense since he’d never met the Paladin before.
Knowing the ruse won’t last long, Maximus confides in his best friend Dane everything that happened. He reveals his master plan: he’s going to kill Quintus.
And that’s it. That’s the plan. Even Quintus can’t help but mock Maximus when the young Knight confronts him. “When you lead, tell me. What will you do when your people are starving?” Quintus asks Maximus.
But Maximus doesn’t want to lead the Brotherhood or kill Quintus. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. “There was no plan,” Maximus says. “I don’t have a plan. You have plans. But out there, you can’t. I don’t choose to do the things I do, they just keep happening.”
It’s a tense encounter and it seems like the two can work things out once Maximus reveals he killed Xander to protect a group of children… who were ghouls.
Just like Xander, Quintus is quick to label the children abominations. The two shoot at each other, but Maximus can’t bring himself to kill the Elder Cleric that took him in when Shady Sands was destroyed. Instead, Maximus locks Quintus in his office as Quintus screams “Heretic! Heretic!” at him.
Meanwhile, Dane steals the cold fusion relic. When they find Maximus, they comfort him by saying he shouldn’t be ashamed of his reluctance to kill a man. They give Maximus the relic and tell him to get as far away as possible.
The other West Coast factions realize the relic is and start killing each other. Maximus and Thaddeus escape into the desert while Dane stays behind to protect the squires.
The Vaults Storyline
The plot linking Vaults 31, 32, and 33 is one of the slowest to develop, almost feeling detached from the rest of the show. Here’s where things stand halfway through the season.
After discovering that Vaults 32 and 33 were part of Bud Askins’ experiment to breed “good managers,” Norm is trapped in Vault 31 with Bud’s brain stuck in a Roomba. Bud tries to pressure Norm into entering a cryopod. Instead, Norm thaws the frozen junior executives and kills Bud.
Norm tricks the thawed junior executives into thinking he’s working for Bud. Together they find their way out of the vault and escape to the surface. Norm doesn’t have a plan as he’s making things up as he goes.
Unfortunately, one of the people Norm thawed was Ronnie, who was Bud’s personal assistant. Ronnie insists it’s time to move to phase two of Bud’s plan but never explains what it is. He mentions something about Future Enterprise Ventures and how it ties into Bud’s plans for Vaults 32 and 33. A worried Norm responds by telling Ronnie to lead the way.
While all that’s going on, Vault 33 is going through it. Several of their own left to repopulate Vault 32. The water chip is still broken, leaving the Vault with only two months of water. Overseer Betty Pearson rations everyone to a single liter per day.
Betty travels to Vault 32 to beg Overseer Steph Harper for help. Steph refuses unless Betty retrieves Hank’s keepsake box, which contains something “personal” for her.
When Woody overhears their conversation, he confronts her since it’s a violation of the Vault-Tec handbook to loiter in the intervault space. He reports it to the Overseer… who is Steph. Obviously she isn’t going to report herself or answer Woody’s questions about what she and Betty were talking about.
Things get stranger when Chet finds Steph’s pre-war ID, revealing she was born in 2045 and is Canadian. That last part is important because in the Fallout universe, the US annexes Canada in the 2070s. Could it be that Steph is actually a part of a secret Canadian resistance working undercover?
The Mind Control Chips
One storyline that feels like it’s been abandoned at this point is the mysterious Black Box mind control tech.
Originally a major focus in the season’s first two episodes, the chip is a receiver implanted at the base of the neck. They make the victims do practically anything the person controlling them wants. Unfortunately, the chip makes the victim’s head explode when overloaded.
The Black Box tech was invented by Robert House in the pre-war era, later improved upon by Vault-Tec. They never do fix the whole head exploding bug, but Hank MacLean is willing to give it a try. He finds an abandoned Vault that was working on the chips in New Vegas and gets to work. He tests the chips on mice, then he moves on to thawing out people that were frozen in the vault to use them as test subjects.
It’s never revealed what Hank plans to do with the Black Box tech. In a call to Mr. House, Hank reveals no one at Vault-Tec knows about his project. And when it’s complete, he believes Mr. House will be begging to work with him.The remaining four episodes of Fallout season 2 drops on Amazon Prime Video every Wednesday at 3:00 a.m ET/12:00 a.m. PT. The finale episode will debut on February 4, 2026.
